


it hurts even in the sun

by imperialhare



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-31 08:26:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21129650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperialhare/pseuds/imperialhare
Summary: Part of him simply wants to lie there with Samothes' hand on his chest and to ignore the branches in his throat and the pollen in his bloodstream, frozen in time like this forever so that they never have to address all the history that hangs between them. Just the warmth of Samothes' palm against his skin.Samot arrives in Aubade with his body full of the invading Spring. Samothes puts him under the surgeon's knife. [More detailed warnings in the beginning of work notes.]





	it hurts even in the sun

**Author's Note:**

> I started out wanting to write something with a bit of romantic body horror about samothes removing the spring from samot's body, and wound up with a lot of meandering melodramatic sadness on top of it. hopefully it's still enjoyable, to read...
> 
> ADDITIONAL WARNINGS: body horror, samot's suicidal ideation, non-graphic but somewhat lingered upon eye trauma, descriptions of surgery/organs/injuries, descriptions of bad plants growing inside samot's body
> 
> title from "crane your neck" by lady lamb which I had on repeat while writing this
> 
> also big thank you to danny for reading this like at least six times in various stages of work-in-progress!! you're the best

_Samot drifts between sleep and wakefulness, in both realms plagued by terrible suffering. He is falling — his mangled body feels both weightless and as if it were all a single bright spot of pain._

_Sleep shows him visions of the past, which is all so typical, he thinks. What a predictable thing, that a god who has as much blood on his hands as Samot would close his eyes and play out his regrets as he dies. It almost bores him, he thinks, as tears stream forth unbidden from his eyes. How useless it is to cry._

_What would they do with the body he left behind, he wonders? Thinking that he and all things would be subsumed by starstuff, he hadn’t had the mind to ask to be enclosed in an ivory mausoleum, or to have his corpse thrown to the wolves. There are no wolves left to give him that dignity. Oh, it is as good a time as any to die, Samot, Last Wolf Alive. The fact that the crawling vines that sunder his flesh all hurt the same seems proof that he shouldn't have a heart to suffer with, glorified being of shadow, but yet he weeps for the love of his father, his husband, his son, all lost to him not by his own death but for a long time now, so long, so long, how long? He is dying alone. That’s what happens when you made as many mistakes as Samot has, he thinks, as his breathing grows ever more shallow._

_Strange then, that he wakes again in Adularia, and that he cannot rest yet but has to stand, and speak, and face trial by the paladin, the man he thought he had loved. _

_Stranger still that he is granted mercy, he thinks, as the Blade in the Dark pierces his chest._

*

Samothes straightens up from his work in the gardens of Aubade Castle to look out over the ocean. There is a storm brewing on the distant horizon, making the sky crackle with electricity. The star-shield that surrounds Aubade tinges the sky a strange and shimmering white sometimes, when the sun is positioned just right, but this — this feels different.

In some other life those stormclouds might have meant nothing — a whim of his aunt’s, or simply a fancy of the winds, left to their own devices. But in Aubade, Samothes always knows the weather.

Until he doesn’t.

The sky turns white as if frost covered a pane of glass in an instant, and then shatters into a thunderclap so powerful it seems to shake the island itself. A commotion breaks out in the Great Hall behind him, and Samothes feels the eyes of concerned citizens looking to him for an explanation, or reassurance. He hears them, but he doesn’t hear them — he is perfectly still, gaze on the water, frozen by a realization. 

"Samothes?" Someone behind him calls his name. He can’t respond.

Wordlessly, he steps forward, away. His legs move themselves — I have to go, I have to go to the shore, _someone might be waiting there for me_ — until he's sprinting out the castle gates and towards the beachfront, down the wet cobblestones as a light rain begins to fall over the island. Hope bubbles up in his chest and he tries to press it back, to be practical, to not want for what shouldn’t be possible.

A body washes up on the shore. A ruined suit of white armor in the low surf thirty meters ahead of him — ten meters ahead — five meters — none. His hands tremble as he falls to his knees in the wet sand; he hardly feels the water as rough waves thick and dark with the storm soak through the legs of his pants, and, hardly daring to hope — he turns the body over.

If it had been anyone else in the world but Samothes, they might not have known.

But he is Samothes, and he does know. He cradles Samot in his arms and feels his heart pounding so hard he can hear it inside his skull. He knows the color of Samot’s yellow hair, even stained by blood and damp with seawater, the angle of his cheekbone, the curve of his jaw. The part of his lips, strained with shallow breathing. 

He doesn’t know the scars or the armor. Doesn’t know the plants that grow verdant from beneath his husband’s skin as if he were an eroding statue in some neglected ruin. He touches one of the few slivers of Samot’s skin that isn’t covered by armor or foliage or blood and he feels as cold as marble. He touches one of the leaves and it feels warm like flesh. 

“Samot,” Samothes calls, and when he hears the strain in his own voice he realizes how much he’s on the verge of tears.

One of Samot’s eyes is obscured with plants, and Samothes doesn’t dare to wonder if it’s gone entirely. His other eye flutters open, revealing a glimpse of clouded violet, familiar enough to make Samothes' stomach twist. Samot turns his face just a fraction — he doesn’t quite look at Samothes; Samothes isn’t sure if he can see at all. 

Samot mouths a soundless name and falls unconscious again.

*

_Samot is falling again. If he fell any further he might fall right past the bottom of Hieron, he thinks. He might scoff, but he has no control over his muscles, and even the thought of laughing makes his chest ache. There's a stab wound there, after all, a fresh pain to distinguish it from all the other pain that sears every inch of his body. Why did Samol curse him, bless him with a body? Why does it feel pain? If he falls to that bottom strata, would he see his son's corpse there, blooming and disfigured by the sinister flora that feed off his blood? Isn't that what's happening to him? If only it could be Samot, lying dead in the darkness of the Dark Son's forge, and instead Maelgwyn could live — oh, but Samot isn't alive either, is he, and Maelgwyn is long dead, out of even Adelaide's grasp, and besides, if Samot truly wanted to trade his life for Maelgwyn's he should have done it long ago, and besides, could he say that he really would have taken that bargain if it had been offered to him?_

_Samol did it for him, didn't he?_

_Ah, but Samot had a good father, and that was the difference between him and Maelgwyn. Too bad Samot managed to squander that too, living a scant handful of months past when he would have died anyway. His story could be Hieron's longest fable: the tale of that prodigal son, teaching men not to make sons out of wolves, and not to ascribe emotions to entropy!_

_He wakes again. How many times does he have to wake? He thinks he hears his husband's voice for a moment before he passes out again. It's more than he deserves._

*

Samothes pays no mind to the crowd gathered in the castle's Great Hall. The body he bears in his arms, grotesque and filthy, is a reminder for all of them that Aubade is an afterlife for victims of a violent death. He goes straight to his workshop and it seems the floor of the castle itself moves to speed him to his destination, carrying his steps further until he crosses the threshold into his office. The furniture there reconfigures itself to his will as he walks in, clearing the space for him and bringing a clean workbench into the center of the room like an operating table.

He lays Samot down as delicately as he can. The room finds a pillow for him to prop Samot’s head on. Samothes runs a finger over the curve of Samot’s cheekbone; he lets the tenderness in his heart grow, lets it settle in him as heavy and warm as the sun on his skin. Whatever the circumstances, his husband is here, and he is not beyond help — no one is beyond Samothes’ help, not in Aubade. He is a god in the kingdom, the world that he created, and if he can’t heal Samot then what is it good for?

He has a knife with a divine blade that can cut through any armor. These days when Samothes makes such things it’s merely for his amusement, but he’s thankful now for his own ingenuity. He carves away Samot’s armor and the chainmail underneath with careful finesse. It seems like almost every patch of skin reveals new injuries, shallow scars and wounds that bloom deep with plants, a cartography of Samot's body that is totally unfamiliar to Samothes. 

It's beautiful, in a horrible way. The strange, bright colors of the vines. The flowers, thick and healthy with petals. 

Cautiously, he grasps one of the large blooms that grow from Samot's chest and begins to cut. The plants seem to move under the pressure of his blade; sap bleeds onto his palm. He severs a thick section of vine and places it in a tray to his side. It writhes like a pulsing organ, then goes still. He doesn’t know if it’s done any good, but surely he can’t let them simply grow rampant...

Samot wakes with a start — _a man is standing over him with a knife and it hurts, it hurts_—

Samothes gasps softly as Samot thrashes and knocks the knife from his hand, but still he manages to react quickly enough to catch him before he falls off the table entirely. “Samot,” he says, urgently, as Samot struggles in his arms like a confused animal, half-blind, incoherent and in pain. “Samot, it’s me!”

Samot lets out a sob of pain and coughs out flower petals before he goes still. He hardly believes it, but the radiant warmth that comes from the man who holds him is almost more unmistakable than the sound of his voice. “S… Samothes?”

“Yes, it’s me. It’s me.” Samothes holds Samot against his chest, cradling him. “You’re going to be okay.”

Samot feels tears welling in his eyes again, this time from sheer emotion. Every ounce of him hurts, every inch. His mind tells him he should be in agony but Samothes’ warmth is blunting the pain just enough for him to be able to be still.

"Here," Samothes says, and places Samot back down. In the brief moment since he left the table it has rearranged itself into a hospital bed, the back propped up slightly so that he can sit up. Samot lies limply on its surface for a moment, all his energy expended in that brief moment of struggle a second earlier. 

A pause, as his scattered thoughts focus on his obscured half-vision.

He raises a hand to his face and wrenches it away in disgust almost immediately, revolted by the feeling of the flowers growing from his skin — soft and textured, organic but unlike human flesh. 

"What happened to me?" he asks, voice harsh. 

Samothes shakes his head helplessly. "I don't know."

"No, I— I remember." He remembers the pain of the starstuff being forced out of his body, how it fell to the ground like molten gold. The Spring crawling through him in its place, uncontrollable and incompatible with his flesh. How Fero had used it to quite literally tear his body apart. It seems incredible that his body was still all connected to itself after that, although he finds himself unable to appreciate such blessings at the moment.

Samot feels the urge to sink his claws into the flesh of his own face, to rip the Spring out by the roots — no matter how much of his body might go with them — to tear them out of his eye, his lungs, his stomach, to rend himself inside out just to feel human again. He was already some horrible, holy amalgam of shadow and flesh, and now this— 

"Samot?" 

Instead he simply clenches his fist and digs little crescents into his palms with his fingernails.

"It's the Spring," Samot says.

Samothes frowns. "What is the Spring?"

"A…" The explanation dies on Samot's lips as he tries to think, to edit down the truth. "It's a new kind of… material. A new kind of life. Its origin… is divine. The… The Druid attacked me, and used it to kill me."

He doesn’t turn to look at Samothes. If he did he would see the unspoken questions in his face, but Samothes merely places his hand on Samot’s and squeezes.

“It’s hurting you, isn’t it?” Samothes says, softly. “Let me try to heal you.”

Samot is silent for a moment. “You should let me die.”

Samothes thinks he heard wrong. “What?”

Samot sighs, and closes his eyes. It hurts to speak but he had never been one to deny himself words if he could speak at all. “It would be better that way.”

As Samot speaks, Samothes watches horrified as the flora in his chest begins to grow again, creeping outward from where he had cut it back.

“Samot…”

“You’re proud of the kingdom you built here… aren’t you? I would only ruin it eventually.”

“Don’t say that. I won’t give up on you again.”

Samot lets out a long exhale.

“I love you,” Samothes says.

Samot makes a noise that might be a sob, but he turns his face away. After a moment, he says, "You must be wondering why I wound up this way.”

“All that matters is that you live. We will have so much time to talk, my love, after this...”

“I tried... I tried—”

“Samot—”

“You don’t understand — I tried to end it. Hieron, I mean. To let the starstuff — oh, Hadrian — you didn’t see his face when he looked at me…”

The vines move again.

“Everything I have done that I thought was in service of my so-called idealism has been — grotesque. Every life I thought could be sacrificed between — between yours, and Hella Varal’s—” Samot’s voice breaks several times as he speaks, he strangles the words out from his ruined throat. The Spring grows. “And then — how they fought me with all they had—”

Leaves bud and unfurl in an instant.

Samothes doesn’t have context for what Samot is telling him, he only wants him to stop hurting himself. “Samot, please… it’s responding to your emotions.”

Samot laughs, nearly hysterical. “Just as well. At least this time the only person I can harm with my despair is myself!”

"Samot." Samothes grabs Samot's face in his hands and turns it towards him. “Samot, look at me.”

Samot looks at him, really looks at his face for the first time. He saw him recently, technically, a mere handful of months ago, through the vision of the mask — but that image had been distant and dreamlike, and even though his eyesight is fuzzy with pain he can see now the way that Samothes’ face has been softened with age, how there are smile lines around his eyes, the way that white has peppered his beard and hair… There is something gentle about him that wasn’t there a hundred thousand years ago, even in the softest parts of him that only Samot was allowed to see. And he is gazing at Samot with tender concern.

"If you can't think of yourself then think of me," Samothes urges. "I don't want you to suffer."

Samot can't help tearing up. He's never been the type of person to refrain from tears, especially now when he feels so weak and small already.

“Cruel man," Samot says, a choked laugh coming up with the sobs. "How dare you love me."

"I do. I do."

Samot laughs again and let out a gasp of pain. "Oh, it hurts."

"Let me remove the Spring," Samothes says again.

“How? With just a knife?”

“A knife, yes, and I can burn out the roots with magic…”

“It’s inside me… I can feel it,” Samot says, placing a hand on his own throat. “In my throat and my lungs and my stomach.”

Samothes hesitates. Samot’s voice is hoarse, scratched by branches. He sees the pain in every motion he makes and longs to be able to soothe him. “I can — I can put you to sleep and cut you open,” he says, as gently as he can. “I’ll take out as much as I can with the knife and burn out the roots with magic. I’ve been able to heal — even worse injuries than this. There was a priestess, Sabinia, who had nearly been consumed by the Heat and the Dark, and I managed to restore her.”

The ghost of a smile quirks Samot’s lips. “Ingenuity Alive." The smile fades, again. "What if it doesn’t work?”

“We’ll find a way. We have all the time in the world, now that you’re here.” Samothes gently puts a hand on Samot's cheek. “If this doesn’t work, then — I could make you new skin, and fill your wounds with porcelain and gold. I could take your entire body apart and rebuild you, if I absolutely had to.”

"How romantic," Samot murmurs. Samothes laughs.

"I should put you to sleep—"

"No," Samot gasps. "I don't — I don't want to face my dreams."

"Then let me ease the pain, at least."

"Alright."

Samothes places a hand on Samot's chest and he feels the gentle pulse of his magic soak through him, warm and bright — like the feeling of drowsing in a sunbeam in the late morning. It doesn't completely take the pain away but it takes the edge off considerably, and Samot feels some of the tension leave his body, allowing him to relax into the makeshift bed. 

"Thank you," Samot murmurs. Part of him simply wants to lie there with Samothes' hand on his chest and to ignore the branches in his throat and the pollen in his bloodstream, frozen in time like this forever so that they never have to address all the history that hangs between them. Just the warmth of Samothes' palm against his skin.

The moment doesn't last, of course. Samothes smiles, pleased to have granted Samot some measure of relief at least, and he gets up to retrieve the knife from the floor where he dropped it earlier. He wipes it clean again and sterilizes it with a flame. 

"Are you sure you don't want me to put you under?" Samothes asks.

"I'm sure." Samot manages a weak smile. "It can be like old times."

Samothes pauses in a memory — a lush forest, long since destroyed, where he hunted a wolf and carved him open, because Samot desired so much for Samothes to know him inside and out in the ways that only gods could know. How unfathomably deep their love for each other was back then, that it could only be expressed fully in the bite of teeth into the flesh of a beating heart. Those are the stories he keeps close to his chest, never shares with the people of Aubade.

The weight of that tender memory makes his heart beat faster. "As you wish," Samothes says.

He runs the blade close along Samot's skin like a shaving razor, cutting back small sprouts that grow close along his smaller wounds. Samothes dusts cuttings off the edge of the blade and onto the ground, until the floor around the bed is littered with bits of green, tiny leaves and stalks. The landscape of Samot's skin is covered in hundreds of little scars and puncture marks from the original shrapnel bomb, and Samothes has to pull the Spring from each one and burn out the roots. 

Samot finds that he still loves to watch Samothes work, the focus and care he puts into every cut, every pinprick of divine heat that Samot feels along his skin. Samot feels like he lies there for hours, straddling the edge of simply floating off to sleep, as Samothes examines him inch by inch, hands warm and calloused. It's surprisingly nice, even with that dull body-wide ache that lies under the surface. 

It feels like hours pass that way, as Samothes examines all his limbs and heals his wounds shut into scars. Samot, in the midst of half-sleep, jolts awake again when Samothes puts a hand on his chest and gently touches the largest flower that grows from his chest. That was where the shrapnel had penetrated his body the deepest, creating a series of interconnected puncture wounds that ringed his chest. Due to that it was also where the Spring grew the thickest. It was only due to the resilience of his divine flesh that he hadn’t died instantly.

"Does it hurt?" Samothes asks. 

"I'm — not sure," Samot murmurs. In a strange way he can feel Samothes' fingers ghosting over the petals, as if the flower had taken root in his very nerves. A dull fear rises in him, twisting his stomach. "Can you remove it?"

Samothes hesitates. "I'll try."

You've seen worse than this before, Samothes thinks. People who showed up to Aubade practically hacked into pieces. 

None of those people had been Samot, though.

With a pair of surgical scissors he snips the flower at its stem (a blooming peony, full as a prize ornamental) and places it aside. The vines are more of a problem, the way they spill out of the wound like an alien growth.

“I don’t suppose you had enough foresight to forge divine garden shears ahead of time,” Samot says wryly.

Samothes smiles weakly. “I’m glad you can have a sense of humor about this.”

“Oh, I’m terrified,” Samot replies. 

Samothes squeezes his hand. “I know, my love.”

Samot feels his heart twist at the words. _My love…_ it stirs a complicated feeling in his chest. My love, spoken into the air so casually.

Samothes cuts a vine and Samot shudders. It doesn’t — it doesn’t _hurt_, not really. But it isn’t painless, either — a feeling more visceral than hair being cut and less painful than the puncture of skin. What has the Spring done to his body? It hurts him to breathe. He wants it out.

“Are you alright?” Samothes asks.

“I’m — fine. Keep going.”

Samothes nods, makes another cut. Sap leaks out over the blade of his knife and he’s relieved it isn’t the color of blood. He's never considered himself a physician but he's had to play at it plenty of times — the engineering of a body, in some ways, is not so different from Ingenuity Alive's specialties — the most important thing is to be precise. He feels Samot's eyes on him, hears the way his breath hitches when he makes an incision.

Several excruciating minutes pass before Samothes sits back and says, “That’s as far as I can go without cutting you open.” The flora doesn't protrude from the gash in Samot's chest anymore, but he still feels it under the surface, writhing. One stray emotion and they might burst free again, longing for the sun. (Samot can hardly begrudge them that — he longs for the sun too.)

"Then cut me open."

Samothes pauses, but it seems absurd to ask Samot if he wants to eat or rest or to even expect him to be able to do those things as long as there are still plants growing inside him. He rests the tip of his knife right below the divot of Samot’s collarbones, and looks to meet Samot’s gaze.

"Are you ready?"

"I am."

Samothes lets more of his magic flow into Samot, uses it to further dull his ability to feel pain. Samot sighs, warmth flooding him again and blunting his senses — he hardly feels the cut of the knife into his skin, the way that Samothes gently, gently carves him open. Sternum to abdomen. There is love in Samothes' focused gaze, yes there is, and Samot feels his heart pounding against its prison of vines.

"Are you alright?" Samothes asks.

"Yes."

When he peels back the skin, Samothes sees the way blooming vines grow through the gaps in Samot's ribcage, how they fill his chest cavity in ways that must make him feel like he might burst. Once again Samothes is struck by their horrible beauty, thick tangles of vines that reveal cup-shaped yellow flowers when he brings them into the light.

"Oh… It almost looks beautiful, doesn't it?" Samot murmurs.

"Yes," Samothes replies.

Samot laughs, and it shifts the mass of Spring in his chest. “Perhaps it suits me,” he says, more viciously than he intends.

Samothes doesn't respond. He cuts through Samot's sternum as though the bone were no more resistant than paper, and spreads his ribcage apart. Oh, he has done this before, many times, but this seems so much heavier than what had merely been the amusements of gods.

"It seems strange to do this to you now," Samothes murmurs. "It always felt strange, but…"

"No, I understand... I didn’t want our reunion to be like this — I wanted — when I still dared to hope for a reunion, I wanted to come to you in joy."

"And there will be joy yet, I know it."

He cuts vines where they wind through Samot's ribs and blots the sap with a cloth. Samot sighs.

"It feels like the Spring has replaced everything inside me… is there anything left of me? Do you still see a heart in my chest, Samothes?"

"Not yet. The vines are too thick."

Little by little, Samothes is thinning them out. It's slow work. He has to be careful not to prick himself on the thorns.

"Sometimes I feel like I truly lost it, long ago, and there was no one to look inside me to tell me if it was still there."

"I'm sorry, my love…"

"No… I don't want you to apologize. That’s not what I meant—” 

"I hurt you. It took me a long time to understand how badly I hurt you."

Samothes remembers, the heart of a god, of his most beloved, beating red within his chest. A jewel that was strangely, magically translucent, with a core in the center like the pit of a peach, and inside that pit was a piece of the Heat and the Dark encased like a blot of ink inside a chunk of amber. It was as much a part of Samot as the body that Samol gave him — essential to his existence.

"Yes, you did, but… I think I already had my misguided retaliation for that. I mourned you a long, long time," Samot murmurs.

Finally, Samothes clears enough of the Spring to see the flesh that should lie in Samot’s chest cavity — he expected to see that same jewel-bright organ, perhaps encased in vines, in a steady, nervous patter — but what he finds is that heart growing leaves, growing vines, growing flowers, as if it were a seed of the Spring itself.

"Your city, your sword, and everything I did after that… I think I may have forgotten what it's like to not be mourning." With his face turned aside, Samot doesn’t catch the brief look of surprise on Samothes’ face. 

"I'm here, now,” Samothes replies, but he feels distant for a moment, trying to decipher what he sees with his eyes. It seems clear that the Spring has irreconcilably merged with Samot’s body, in a way that even he doesn’t have the power to reverse. 

Samot catches the pause, then. “What is it?”

“Your body… the Spring… They’ve fused together.”

“What do you mean? You can’t take it out?”

Samothes shakes his head. “I wouldn’t be able to without carving your heart out altogether.”

Samot is silent for a long moment and then laughs, and it’s as defeated a sound as Samothes has ever heard. “Carve it out, then. Plant it in the garden and burn the rest of me to ash. No — I know you wouldn’t, even as much as I wish you would. I’m sorry, I just...” 

Samothes wants badly to comfort him, but doesn’t know what to do other than gently resting a hand alongside Samot’s face, running a thumb over his cheekbone, hoping to ground him. He doubts anything he could say — about the future, about how everyone in Aubade has managed to adjust eventually to the changes in their bodies, about how Samot is still the person he is — would be reassuring at this moment.

“Let me trim back the last of it, so that it doesn’t hurt you so much, at least.”

Samot gives him a small nod. With quick pulses of heat Samothes targets the vines that grow into Samot’s lungs and throat, cuts them out bit by bit with quick strokes of the knife. Samot’s breaths grow more uneven, pained as Samothes cuts into delicate flesh, the fine tissue of his airways — the romantic in him wishes that Samothes would simply tear into him with his teeth, but that would defeat the point, wouldn’t it? Surgery, not romance, is the task at hand. He sees Samothes remove fine branches. 

Samothes puts a hand on Samot’s throat to steady the blade as he cuts vines out of his windpipe, and that sends a rush to Samot’s head that makes him dizzier than he already is from shortness of breath. He wishes for more, longs for the taste of Samothes’ lips, so that he can imagine this is an intricate ritual rather than an operation. 

Warmth blooms in his chest where Samothes fills him with the soft glow of his healing magic. Samot’s breath stutters, and then evens again. He feels raw, still, but it’s a relief to be able to breathe without branches in his throat.

“There. It’s done.”

Samot lets out a long exhale.

“What do I do now?” he asks.

Samothes knows it’s an existential question more than anything. “What do you want to do?”

“I want… I want you to stitch me back up, Samothes. I won’t waste your efforts. I’ll live. I’ll live with it.”

He doesn’t sound entirely convinced, but Samothes nods anyway, and squeezes his hand.

“What else can you do? We died and did not die. Life is pain.”

_Not here, not like this_, Samothes wants to say. _It shouldn't be_, he wants to say. But instead he nods and heals Samot's broken bones with golden light, and stitches him shut with divine needle and thread. Listening to the rise and fall of Samot’s breath as he does. Feeling Samot’s gaze on his hands, watching him work as he had so many times in the past.

*

“Okay. How does that feel?”

Samot can hear the cry of gulls outside, and the sound of children playing in the castle gardens. Slowly, he opens his eyes and looks up into Samothes’ face, who is gazing at him with a concerned smile.

“It feels better,” Samot murmurs. “Like there’s something there, at least.” 

Samothes hands him a mirror, and Samot brushes his hair back from his face to look at himself. The false eye on his right looks exactly like his real one, down to the little flecks of silver over the indigo. He marvels at Samothes’ attention to detail.

He misses being able to see out of both, of course, but there is more to sight than having eyes, for a god. “It’s beautiful,” he says, handing the mirror back to Samothes and smiling. “Thank you.”

There are still flowers poking out of the gash in his chest, which seems like it may never close. Last night he woke from nightmares, his chest hurting so badly that he’d crawled pitifully out of his own bedroom to go to Samothes for comfort. (He can’t bring himself to officially sleep in the same bed with him, not yet.) Samothes sits beside him for a moment, and Samot allows himself the small indulgence of resting his head upon his shoulder.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can improve about it,” Samothes says, reaching over to briefly stroke Samot’s hair. Any prolonged affection still seems dangerous, these days. “Or if there’s anything you need at all.”

“I will,” Samot replies. 

From the window in that bedroom they can see the sun setting, coloring the sky pink and gold. Samothes’ proudest creation, so fine that he had invented it a hundred thousand times over.

The weight of all the confessions he will have to make is heavy on Samot’s heart, and he feels the vines that live inside him threatening to choke him with guilt whenever his thoughts wander. But for tonight, this small warmth seems like enough.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on twitter @imperialhare!


End file.
